


Artificial Intelligent Design

by euromagpie



Series: Mirrors of Interest [1]
Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: AU, F/F, Gen, although contrary to most black mirror episodes this one has a happy ending, because shoot deserves to be happy, black mirror fusion, but its more sort of a background shoot, gen and shaw are adorable and there need to be more fics about them, inspired by root's girl scout alias because Hello, probably less shoot than you guys would like
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-07
Updated: 2016-11-07
Packaged: 2018-08-29 13:30:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8491612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/euromagpie/pseuds/euromagpie
Summary: Shaw's dying, but instead of playing life-and-death whack-a-mole with New York's rodent population, she comes face to face with a homeless girl hiding from a world that wants to take her apart.(Part of a Black Mirror x Person of Interest fusion fic series)





	

 

The day was cold – dry, but freezing, and Shaw watched her breath drift into the grey sky in a cloud of vapour. She was pillowed on a pile of garbage bags. Thankfully the smell wasn’t as bad as it was in the summer months. What stink did waft up to her nose, she only registered in a peripheral way; her mind was too focussed on the blood leaking out of her, despite the hastily slapped-on bandage and gauze she’d nicked from a nearby ambulance. She was in a lot of pain, but Shaw was good at compartmentalising, and she pushed it to the back of her mind, instead trying to convince her body to up and at ‘em on sheer willpower alone.

She’d been trying for the past three or so hours – nothing happened.

 _I’m gonna die here_ , Shaw thought, dispassionately, but with an edge of disgust at her situation. _God, this is pathetic_.

She’d always thought she would die in a hail of bullets, or in the blast of a bomb, or, God, with some sort of _purpose_ , not in some anonymous back-alley in New York, run down by her ex-colleagues, to become fodder for America’s rodent population.

A can rolled in the alley, and Shaw tried not to think about rats already scampering up her and ripping chunks of flesh out before she was even dead. Numb fingers curled around the handle of her Glock; it was out of bullets, but she’d grind them mousy motherfuckers into jam before she let herself get nibbled to death.

Instead of the cold press of a rat’s nose, though, she felt small hands tug on her wool overcoat. With a gigantean effort, Shaw rolled her neck to look to her side.

The stranger was a young girl, about ten if Shaw had to guess, with flyaway blonde hair and huge eyes that stared at her with curiosity. The girl was dressed in a skirt and purple cami. In the winter.

 _What the fuck_.

“…sdjhd. Ngh.” Shaw tried to articulate, but her lips felt thick and clumsy. The girl cocked her head.

“Are you a spy?”

Shaw blinked slowly.

“…why? ‘R you?” She didn’t know why she said that – the kid was practically a foetus! She was probably still learning to read ( _Wait, can ten year olds read?_ Shaw wondered; beyond ‘avoid them’, she had very little knowledge about kids).

“Don’t be silly. But I’m going to be.” The kid said in a way that suggested it was an indisputable fact of the universe. Shaw could respect self-conviction at the very least.

“Good for you, kid. Now scram ‘n’ leave me t’ die in peace.” Well, as close to ‘peace’ as one could in Shaw’s situation. Shaw turned her head back to the sky.

She heard some scrabbling noises and assumed the kid left. She was wrong though – a few minutes passed, but then she felt a heavy blanket drape over her; it was musty and smelled a bit, but Shaw’s body started shivering again as the air under the blanket started to warm up. The rough rim of a plastic bottle touched her lips and before her mind could kick in warning her against drugs, poisons and the like, tepid water dripped into her mouth and she drank without thinking.

 _Still bleeding out, though_.

As though she could hear her thoughts (or maybe Shaw was talking out loud, she was pretty out of it on and off), the girl peeled back the blanket only a little bit, poking at the gauze, saturated scarlet already, and probably with layers of grime, sweat and dirt trapped under it. Shaw wanted to snap at her to leave off, but her body was doing its best broken down car impression again, so she just laid there, putting her life in the hands of the strange little girl.

Little fingers undid the bandages and pulled off the gauze. There was a moment while the girl did something to the plastic bottle – Shaw turned her head just in time to see the kid pierce a hole in it with a nail – before a stream of water hit the wound.

Shaw hissed, and jerked once, but knew that the water would do a good job, even if it wasn’t the cleanest thing ever. The girl then placed a folded square of fabric on top of the wound and pressed down – the fabric was a pastel blue with flowers on it, and a ribbed strip on the bottom suggested it came from a hoodie or jumper of some kind. A ripping sound was heard, and then the girl was taping the fabric down with silver ductape.

She pulled the blanket back over Shaw.

 She looked at the girl incredulously, trying to ignore the burning sting in her side.

“They teach ‘mergency aid in pre-school?” She asked sarcastically.

“I’m _ten_ , not five. And they did it on Hawaii Five-0.” She said. The television reference went over Shaw’s head, but instead she just nodded lethargically. Now she had a source of hydration, at least some warmth and was no longer bleeding out, all she had to worry about was infection and the government agents trying to kill her.

Shaw’s day was looking up.

Except for this crazy kid hanging around gang neighbourhoods in -1C weather in summer clothes.

“Jeez kid, aren’t you freezing?” Shaw finally snapped.

“My name’s not kid, it’s Genrika, but you can call me Gen. And I’m not equipped to feel cold.” Gen said.

 _Weird way of phrasing it_ , Shaw thought _, but not the weirdest I’ve come across_.

“You should go home.” Shaw knew she sounded cold (hah! She was fucking _freezing_ ), but she also knew that at any moment some of Control’s buddies could shower the alley with Uzi fodder, and Shaw knew she’d signed up for that possibility when she’d accepted the black ops job – Genrika hadn’t, even if she was a crazy kid.

“Go on, shove off.”

“You’re lying in my home.” Gen pointed out. For a moment it didn’t register with Shaw what the girl meant, until her brain figured out where the water and blanket had come from.

“You live in an alley?” It wasn’t the first time Shaw had come across homeless kids, and hell, wasn’t even the first time she’s had to interact with them, but for some reason Gen felt different to them. For one, she wasn’t swaddled in oversized, ragged clothes and hoarding her food and water like she should have been, she shouldn’t have been sharing this with conked out randos who drop into her lap.

Gen raised an eyebrow.

“I do now. Better than staying with Vadim.” She said his name with a sneer curling her delicate lips. Shaw raised an eyebrow back, like they were competing in some facial gymnastic competition.

“He beat you?” She asked, more out of need to pass the time than any sort of Samaritan sympathy.

Gen shrugged.

“He wanted to sell me.”

Shaw felt a sick jolt in her stomach, but refused to acknowledge it. Again, it wasn’t the first time she’d run into kids put into awful situations, even child prostitution (and she definitely wasn’t feeling any sort of attachment forming with this strange kid, nope, that’s just her stomach cramping from not having eaten anything in 48 hours. Really.).

“Sick fuck.” She said instead. Gen’s eyebrows furrowed in question as she stared at her until Shaw shifted, squeaking loudly across the plastic bags in discomfort.

“What?” She snapped.

“You’re the first person I’ve heard say that about things like us.”

This time it was Shaw’s turn to look questioning.

“Huh?”

“You know, right? That I’m not a person; I’m a Teknoid.”

Oh.

 _Oh_.

Everything made sense suddenly. A kid who was running from being sold, who looked as comfortable in an alleyway as if she was lounging in her bedroom, who felt no fear of danger even from an injured woman holding a gun.

A kid who wasn’t equipped to feel the cold.

Teknoids were the new fad for rich couples wanting to play house. Robots who looked and acted like children, who could even have factory upgrades to allow them to ‘grow’. But like with any electronic gadget, some people got tired of them – usually they got returned to the original factory, disassembled and parts reused, but some were sold on to lowlife mechanics and stripped down for spare-parts. There was even a reward offered for runaway Teknoids.

 _These things are really lifelike_ , Shaw thought. She tried to look at Gen with new eyes, with the knowledge that the kid wasn’t a kid at all, just a bunch of wires and chips in a human-looking shell.

It was just a robot.

A robot, whose brain worked via electronic pulses from one centre to another.

A robot who loved spies and criminal shows.

A robot who could show disgust.

(When she was a teenager, Shaw had wondered if you stripped away the skin and muscle and ligaments, if she wasn’t a robot underneath, because she didn’t feel like the other kids. Because she ran on anger and spite and nothing much else).

She’d been quiet too long, and Gen took a cautious step backwards.

“…Do you hate me now?” She asked quietly, and Shaw’s stomach did that sick jolty thing again. She wondered if Gen had a Bounty bar or something stashed away here somewhere.

“…Nah. Just ‘cause you’re not like everyone else doesn’t mean you’re not a person.”

Maybe the blood-loss was making Shaw light-headed because apparently 8-hours with a gunshot lodged in her abdomen turned her into a sap. Oh, and apparently seeing Gen’s face light up with a wide grin, made her feel all warm and fuzzy.

 _Urgh, I really need to shoot something_.

 

**Ten Months Later**

 

Bishop, Texas, is the opposite of that day she and Gen had met – the sky was clear and blue and the heat rises off the baked ground, making buildings and road-sign shiver with distortion. Shaw leaned against the bonnet of her car, an ugly, tin-coloured Ford Fiesta (it may not be anything to get Shaw’s gears shifting, but it got her where she needed to go, and that’s good enough). Her dark hair was tied back and a black baseball cap pulled down on her head, large sunglasses reflecting the bus shelter she was waiting near.

Finally a battered bus pulls up, faded and peeling decals a pale orange. The doors shift open with a groan like the undead, and a host of children spill out. Shaw braced herself – she was an ex-government agent, she was _not_ going to flinch from a bus-full of Sixth Graders. The kids dispersed to whatever appropriate parental figure was waiting for them in the parking-lot; Shaw kept a sharp eye out until she spotted the only figure she was interested in – Gen came bounding out of the bus, running up to Shaw and pulling off a textbook salute, which Shaw returned with a lazy two-finger tap to the head.

“Finally. I was about to go and just leave you to your fate.” She groused. Gen grinned up at her and pulled at her beige sash.

“Guess what! I’m getting a Bronze Cross!” Gen nearly shouted, excitedly bouncing on the balls of her feet. Shaw was about to ask what was so special about the Bronze Cross, when a woman exited the bus, walking up to Gen and Shaw. She was taller than Shaw, slim and with bouncing chocolate curls. She laid a hand on Genrika’s shoulder.

“Your daughter saved the life of a girl in her group. She’s a very brave young lady.” She smiled widely.

Shaw, despite her best efforts, felt a hot flush start crawling its way up her neck. She cleared her throat awkwardly, patting Gen on the head in jerky movements.

“Well done, kid. I’m p-, well, you did good.” It wasn’t exactly the praise of the century, but Gen lit up like a candle anyway. Like a real kid.

She was a real kid.

“I wanted to talk to you about submitting the application for the medal. Perhaps over dinner?” The woman asked, in her soft, musical voice.

Shaw tried to vainly struggle against the rising heat in her cheeks, blaming it on the Texas sun, and not the very hot Girl Scouts leader asking her out to dinner. A professional dinner. Professionally.

 _Fuck_.

“Yeah. Yeah, sure. You’re buying.” She said brusquely, hoping to divert attention from her scarlet face. Gen glanced at Shaw in confusion at the croaky sound to her normally deep and bass-like voice.

The woman just smiled.

“Of course. I’ll send you the details. My name’s Samantha Groves – lovely to meet you.”


End file.
